Lindsay Caplan’s Arte Programmata offers a compelling account of a group of lesser-known artists affiliated with the Italian Arte Programmata movement, whose experimental art and design practices, emerging in the nascent years of computerization, pointedly (and presciently) engaged with political questions around freedom and control, individuality and collectivity. Beautifully written, sharply analytic, and free of jargon, Caplan’s incisive study should find a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the roots and impacts of technological change.

Arte Programmata forces us to reconsider ossified ideas about the relationship between politics and aesthetics by asking us to think seriously about what we mean when we reflexively invoke concepts such as resistance, subversion, and negation to understand radical art and design practices. In doing so, Lindsay Caplan disrupts the categories and boundaries circumscribing art history’s presumed objects and methods. Here, art, design, theory, and politics comingle in new ways that allow us to see the continuing relevance of a particular strand of Italian art and design while also inspiring readers to reconsider their own assumptions about the many forms freedom might take in both our intellectual work and our lives.

Arte Programmata is simultaneously revolutionary and pragmatic.

This book is a rich and sophisticated narrative of the unfolding of Arte Programmata during the decade of the 1960s.

Arte Programmata provides a nuanced, incisive window into the ways in which artists grappled with arrival of computing technology in postwar Italy.

Well-written and relatively jargon-free, Arte Programmata is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the intersection of art and technology (and artists and engineers).

A carefully reconstructed history, focusing on the political dimension and context in which the left, Eco’s ‘open work,’ and early computer art flourished in the same spaces.